Proactive-reactive aggressiveness in high school students: Scale construction, examination of relations to physical and relational aggression, exploration of subtypes

Abstract

In the present study, the Proactive-Reactive Aggressiveness Scales for High School Students (SPRAS-H), a self-report scale, was developed, and relationships between proactive-reactive aggressiveness and physical and relational aggression were investigated, as were subtypes of proactive-reactive aggressiveness and their psychological features. High school students (N = 2,010) completed a questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis of their responses revealed that SPRAS-H had the exact same 6-factor structure as the Proactive- Reactive Aggressiveness Scales for Junior High School Students (SPRAS-J). Additional confirmatory factor analysis indicated high goodness-of-fit indices for the oblique 2-factor model of proactive and reactive aggressiveness. All subscales of the SPRAS-H showed sufficient reliability and concurrent validity. Multiple regression analysis revealed that 40% of the variance in physical aggression and 30% of the variance in relational aggression could be explained by gender and proactive-reactive aggressiveness. Cluster analysis indicated that there were 2 types of highly aggressive subgroups. The extremely aggressive subgroup had high scores on both the proactive and reactive aggressiveness subscales, whereas the reactively aggressive subgroup had high scores only on the reactive aggressiveness subscale. These results provide support for Crapanzano's severity model (Crapanzano, Frick, & Terranova, 2010).